Hi everybody
I just catch a dfam and there is something I don’t understand, when I play a sequence, the steps with velocity set to zero are played, maybe less loud what the notes with velocity set to maximum, is it normail ?
Thanks in advance
Emmanuel
Yes, that’s normal - the DFAM’s sequencer has no rests. Every one of the eight steps fires a trigger, so the envelopes are retriggered on every step regardless of where the velocity slider sits. The velocity row isn’t a note on/off switch, it’s a control voltage row, and a slider at zero just means “zero volts of that CV”, not “skip this step”.
How loud a zero-velocity step ends up being depends on how much of the sound is coming from velocity versus from the envelopes themselves. If the VCA is already being opened by its envelope with a decent amount, a zero-velocity step still comes through, only a bit quieter. To make the difference between minimum and maximum steps really obvious, pull the level that isn’t velocity dependent down and lean more on velocity - then low steps get much closer to silent.
If you want a genuine rest, you have to do it from the patch bay rather than the slider. The usual approaches are to take the VELOCITY output to something that gates the sound - for example into the VCA CV input while keeping the VCA’s own envelope amount low - or to use the trigger/advance jacks so certain steps don’t sound at all. External sequencing into the ADV/CLOCK and TRIGGER inputs gives you the most control if rests matter to your pattern.
Also worth trying: patch VELOCITY to the VCF cutoff as well as amplitude. Quiet steps then also sound darker, which reads much more like dynamics than a level change alone. Great machine, it just rewards thinking in CV rather than in steps and rests.
Hi
Thanks for your complete answer
Best regards